Extra! Extra! Read all about it!!!

Sokay Zine (zine as in magazine) is an idea that had been tumbling around in my head for a while. It’s a 20 page 4.5×4.5″ booklet. During the development of Donut Get! I was printing out a ton of flyers for our monthly LA Art Walk show, Sokay Play. To come up with the art for the flyers, I was digging through folders of old art work gathering dust on my hard drives. Looking through all of the unseen or unfinished assets got me thinking. There was a ton of stuff that I forgot we even made. I figured something should’ve been done with it.

When I was out on the streets hustling Donut Get! and Sokay, I made a buncha flyers, stickers and buttons. It felt good to be making physical stuff again. Reminded me of drawing on line paper in class back in the day. I’d seen people online making zines about things they’re fans of and I thought, “Why can’t I do something like this for Sokay?”

I remembered back in the 80s and 90s game companies often used quarterly print newsletters to reach their audiences and let them know more about their games coming out. Nintendo Power started out as one of these. This was another source of inspiration.

The making of our first game Thugjacker became the focus of the zine. We made Thugjacker before I had started blogging so it was a fresh topic to write about. To put it together, spent a ton of time digging up artwork, exporting frames of animation out of the game, looking at cut content and trying to piece together the story. It was a challenge to put it to words and be concise with it (unlike my blog posts).

Example of a Japanese guide for Faxanadu (1987-ish)

My last blog post was a review of The Untold History of Japanese Developers. On the behind the scenes DVD I got glimpses of just how in depth the Japanese game world’s print industry was. You could find a thick strategy guide for just about any game you could imagine. Seeing how they laid out game levels in those books became inspiration for my “walkthrough” of the first stage of Thugjacker in the zine.

So after assembling the zine digitally, I had to print these things out. I had a short timeline since I was aiming to print about 100 for my trip to Bitsummit in Kyoto, Japan. So I opted to print them in my bedroom rather than look for a professional printer. For 2 weeks, I was swimming in CMYK. I learned a lot through trial and error but I’ve got a decent system for printing up batches when I get a chance. Up to now I believe I’ve printed about 160 copies but I’m always short. Hit me up if you’re interested in a copy! Still need to look into a printshop though!

I’ve been neglecting this place. I haven’t even been announcing our games officially on the blog. (by the way, we stealthily released The Crazy Program on Android!)

For the past year or two I’ve been hacking away at HTML game demos on and off. Thinking about it, I never followed through and released something. For a time, I was thinking seriously about doing a Japanese styled mobile card game, similar to the now famous Puzzles & Dragons but I sort of hit a wall with my approach to using 3D with CSS. But that ended up just turning into a blog post outlining a CSS3 technique.

I decided to release this new project as early as possible and get something out the door, no matter how rough it was. Introducing…

RUSH-D (alpha)!

RUSH-D is a Sokay game series that never got quite off the ground. I started designing RUSH-D as a side-scrolling space shooter (SHMUP) fashioned after some of my favorite games — Einhander and UN Squadron. I created a simple Flash prototype while I was working on Thugjacker and in those days, that was enough to completely sidetrack me away from my main project.

Here’s a screen shot of RUSH-D (aka Sokay Rush) prototype.

Since this was back in the day (around 2003), I thought I was clever planning to use pre-rendered 3D art to wow all of the Flash game audience. My expectations grew and I never got really far with the project outside of a few design docs and concept art. Continue Reading…

I ported DONUT GET! to OUYA with the hope of it being a OUYA launch title. I anticipated that it would at least help bring a bit more attention to DONUT GET!, especially since it didn’t get as much coverage as expected. Fortunately DONUT GET! was listed as one of the 104 OUYA launch titles, and mentioned on sites like Destructoid.

We’ve made our download stats available for DONUT GET! on OUYA. It’s a totally free game — there’s no in-app purchases.

A large problem within the OUYA community is that the company is slowly trickling out the ~60,000 Kickstarter units. For developers it’s a bit unsettling with the low download numbers, and the myriad of other software problems we’re dealing with. Continue Reading…

Los Angeles, California – Oct. 29, 2012 – Sokay.net is proud to announce that DONUT GET! is now available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and web browsers. DONUT GET! is a game about a cop eating donuts raining from the sky.

Everyone knows police officers fantasize about the burning of Donut Shops, and Officer Brown is no exception. With donuts bursting in air, there’s proof in the night that Officer Brown will be there. You assume duty as our rotund hero crosses the thin blue line with sweet dreams of round treats bouncing behind his eyes–plenty o’ donuts to get.

The web-based Flash version is 3 games in 1: driving, fighting and donut getting. The player’s actions change the game itself and multiple cinematic endings are available.

The mobile and tablet versions of DONUT GET!, developed with Unity, are a streamlined, arcade version of the game. The objective is simple. There are donuts. GET THEM. As many as possible. The game integrates the GREE platform for leaderboards and achievements.

Sokay.net is an independent game development team in Los Angeles, California. They say it never rains in Southern California. At Sokay, we make it rain. Sokay.net has developed the games Thugjacker, LUV Tank, Rush Hour Plus and Sammy Samurai.

Last week I spent some time prototyping our next game in Unity. Of the block matching puzzle game variety.

This week I jumped back to focusing on Donut Get! iPad version and finishing up where I left off with the in app purchasing. I was running into a problem of it just crashing when a purchase started so I had to do a bit of optimizing to prevent that. So far so good, as now I can at least get it to work!

In app purchase screen to remove ads.

Thank you screen!

The textures for the sprite animation is eating up a ton of memory. I’ve tried to keep the cop animation sharp and crisp but I’ve had to bring down the res a bit to accommodate all the lower-end devices it keeps crashing. 🙁 So for now, I’m trying to stop crashing Android phone! haha

Later I hope to do some research to switch between spritesheets based on the memory available on the device. Not quite sure if that’s possible/reasonable yet.

Sent out a Beta link to a buncha peeps yesterday, thinking through the feedback to see what I should try to address and what I’ll decide what is “intended to be like that!” haha! It’s a tricky thing for me because there are some things people want/expect to be explained clear as day, while I intend for the game to be a bit of an exploration. You’ll figure out more about it the more times you play. But the major issues I’ll need to address first will be things that make it easier to replay — shortening slower parts, making it easier to skip parts, etc.

I’ve been reworking the Donut drop patterns which have been super rough. Trying to create a flow to it.

These are the items that fall from the sky in the Donut segment

There are 3 types of items that fall…

Donuts: variety of 5 types, these are like points

Debris: these mess up your day, fall on your head and make you drop to the ground

Coffee: speeds you up, makes your jumps floaty, lasts briefly

With the unspoken objective of collecting as many donuts as possible, the player runs back and forth collecting donuts. Bouncing on the heads of the NPCs allows you to jump high into the sky and lets you collect many more donuts than you can get on the ground. You must do this while avoiding hazardous NPCs that knock you down or fight you. Also debris is falling as well so you need to avoid it. The coffee powerup is meant to be a temporary speed boost, I’m trying to design the pattern so that you can get a flow of coffee boosts if you navigate through the obstacles well.

Working on the donut drop pattern is a tedious mess because I’m doing it with a ghetto array and it takes a while to build the game and test changes. I would do this a completely different way if I was starting the project today but that’s another story… haha!

David’s waiting on me to do some more animation, I’m gonna setup some additional characters that will be added to the game sooner or later. And I need to take another pass at the fighting game…

Last time I posted, I was wrapping up some of the fight sequence animations…

Then I focused on finishing up a bunch of NPC animation for the characters running around in the game…

The perfectionist in me isn’t satisfied with some of the animation but its GE (Good Enough) so I managed to move on to other things.

The game will be localized in 4 languages: English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish. Many thanks to my homies with language skills that were willing to throw down. So far most of the Chinese is complete, Russian is almost halfway.Continue Reading…